


Patches

by Misaya (orphan_account)



Series: Synchrony [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst and Humor, Avengers Tower, Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Relationships, Falling In Love, M/M, Memory Loss, Modern Era, POV First Person, POV Steve Rogers, Plot, Post-Movie(s), Pre-Avengers (2012), Recovered Memories, Sequel, Steve Rogers and the 21st Century, Technology, Tony Angst, Tony Stark Feels, kind of, super confused about how this fits into the Marvel timeline but try and deal with it thanks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-21
Updated: 2014-12-27
Packaged: 2018-02-14 01:29:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2172798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Misaya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As useful as the 21st century is, it would still appear that it still has some rather bothersome flaws, namely: </p><p>1. The newfangled devices in the kitchen are all out on a quest for Steve's blood<br/>2. A "Tinder" is not actually something used to start a fire and <br/>3. Apple Maps just can't seem to help him find his way around his own feelings. Or any other place, for that matter. </p><p>Eventual Steve/Tony, a sequel to "Awake, Aware." A bit more lighthearted than its prequel, takes place somewhere around modern day, some spoilers for Captain America: The Winter Soldier. To avoid unnecessary confusion, please read "Awake, Aware" before this. If you don't, don't say I didn't advise you to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Schedule

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fannyvonfabulus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fannyvonfabulus/gifts), [bibliolatry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bibliolatry/gifts).



I've started living my life very strictly according to schedule. If you'd thought I was anal retentive as a soldier back in WW2, well, you'd be dead by now, probably. On the off hand that you aren't, you'd see that I've gotten more timetable-oriented and have developed some sort of odd fanaticism about living minute to minute all according to a prewritten plan. The telephones today are tremendously convenient for doing such a thing; the one that Natasha got me is something called an Apple iPhone: it's fascinating, the way you can touch the screen and the little icons and play games or send messages or read the news. It's also enormously useful for planning out my day, and I'm really quite grateful to her for purchasing it for me, but she just brushed it off and told me it came from SHIELD funds or something of the sort. I personally think she was bluffing, as she didn't quite meet my eye, but she just told me not to worry about where it came from.

I'm sure it had nothing to do with the police officers who came to my door a few hours later and held up their badges, all official-like, and started babbling something at me about GPS trackers and stolen merchandise. They were throwing so much technical jargon around that I ended up calling Nick Fury on my iPhone, and a few minutes later he just...dropped down out of the sky, all huge and terrifying and positively menacing, and called the police officers some very...explicit expletives that I can't say. They were quite derogatory, but the police officers looked quite cowed (perhaps it was Nick's threatening posture and the fact that he's also missing an eye and goes around wearing an eyepatch like a pirate) and backed away with apologies. 

6 AM: Wake up. My iPhone sounds like a foghorn at 6 AM on the dot, just like the sound I used to wake up to as a child in Brooklyn, stumbling out of the house with Bucky dragging me behind him, rubbing frantically at my eyes as we reached the top of the hill a mile or so away from our houses, watching as the sun tipped over the outline of the bay and the lighthouses sounded their calls to guide the ships into safe harbor. 

I've asked Natasha what's happened to Bucky, if there was any news about him from the 1940s; really, I've asked her if I can have another memory of him besides the last one, where he was falling, falling, falling, stretching and reaching out for my hand as if I could save him one last time, the fear and resignation spiking deep through his dark brown eyes as he realised that I couldn't catch him, that I was no superhero, that I was just an ordinary man who could afford to take a few more chances than most. She's hedged a bit, looked over to the side and scuffed her toes into my linoleum floor, and told me that she personally couldn't answer that. I wonder what she's hiding from me, but it's probably not such a good idea to press her. I've seen her at the SHIELD gym, bench-pressing barbells that probably weigh twice as much as she does. 

6:10 AM: I go run a few laps around Central Park after brushing my teeth. It's certainly changed since the last time I've been here, but then again, I suppose most things do change after 70 or so years. That's just the way the world works.

7:00 AM: Obligatory bathroom trip, a shower, a shave, and brushing my teeth for the second time. They've apparently got toothpaste in all kinds of flavours these days. I'm partial to the cinnamon, myself. And don't get me started on the vast variety of shampoos and aftershaves and colognes they've got at the department stores. Natasha went out with me to buy my toiletries, and when I stood for a solid two minutes in the shampoo aisle trying to work up the courage to ask why hair hydration was so important (I wasn't under the impression that hair drank water, or that the biology of hair was similar to that of a plant...perhaps hair photosynthesized?), she elbowed me in the ribs and told me to just pick one that I liked the smell of. We ended up bringing home a green bottle shaped like a fish with a red cap that promises it's tear-free (at this, I imagined some poor person rubbing some other, lesser brand of shampoo into their hair and sobbing, but Natasha told me it meant nothing of the sort, and also mocked me for buying a children's shampoo. I see no problem with this). 

7:30 AM: I make breakfast for myself, usually eggs and toast and coffee. The coffeemaker Nick set up in my kitchen is one of these newfangled devices where you stick a little cup of flavoring in the top and the coffee comes out the bottom. A really interesting, really complicated gadget. I cannot speak so highly of the toaster, however; it is fond of burning me and not actually toasting the bread, despite its hellish temperature. I remember Howard Stark once had some plans going for artificial intelligence, where he tried to mimic human intelligence and communication in inanimate machines. Perhaps his ideas have worked out, and the toaster is one such example. 

9 AM: I head over to NYU with my sketchpad and pencils. I've enrolled in some art courses; I've always wanted to go to art school, but being in one of the worst wars in US history kind of throws a wrench into those plans. The teacher tells me that I'm an exceptional figure drawer, although I lack creativity and keep drawing the same features over and over, producing people with dark eyes and dark hair that curls over their forehead and a mouth that quirks up at the corner. Believe me, I've tried to draw people as they really appear, but I just happen to suddenly look down and there are the dark hair and eyes that I know so well. Dark eyes and dark hair can't be too uncommon in the population, surely, so perhaps I'll run into that person one day and just know that they're the one for me. You know what I'm saying? Maybe you don't, I've always been sappy like that. 

12 AM: Lunch. I love lunch. 

1 PM: I sit with Natasha for a few hours and she educates me about some of the newer things in the 21st century. Just the other day, she showed me how to operate the little black box embedded in the wall in my kitchen, which she called a microwave. She put a bowl of food inside, and I watched as it spun round and round in a circle, almost knocking her over when it beeped and announced that the food was ready. Lately, she hasn't been around much, so I've just been browsing the Internet and looking through online news articles. That's about the extent of my computer knowledge. 

6 PM: Dinner. Dinner is also fantastic. Sometimes Nick eats with me and stabs his steak with a knife that looks lethal, and it's quite the sight, him just staring at me over the table with that eye of his and popping steak into his mouth with the edge of his knife while I attempt to make polite conversation. (It's actually downright awkward, but God forbid I let him hear me saying that.) 

8 PM: I watch a television show or a movie, and attempt to catch up on pop culture. It still baffles me. How could people possibly care where that celebrity went to get their nails painted or who that singer got caught kissing backstage? 

9 PM: Bedtime. I must say sleeping is an excellent activity, and I do highly recommend it, although I do have the oddest dreams. A little child saying something about The Whisper Man and Captain America, a middle school student complaining about one of his friends, a young man reading to me from a history textbook. His features are always the same, dark eyes, dark hair, slender hands, and perhaps this is why I can't draw any other kinds of features. It's a mystery to me, really. 

Today was a day like any other. I got up, went for a run, ate breakfast, went to class, ate again, and waited patiently for Natasha to drop by my apartment. She'd apologised for being so busy the past few days, but she was definitely going to come today. I checked my phone, checked it again an instant later, as if she might have texted in the millisecond I looked away. 1:15 PM. And she hadn't said anything. Her message screen didn't even have the dots to tell me she was writing something, and I felt a bit miffed at being blown off so easily. 

She burst in the door at 1:23 PM, her hair wild and ringing her face like a fiery halo. She didn't even acknowledge me before she reached for the television remote and flicked it on. I opened my mouth to say something, but she shushed me and changed the channel to the news, told me to just shut up and watch. 

I don't usually watch the afternoon news, I prefer the evening ones, but the picture to the left of the announcer's face had me silent and gaping at the screen. 

It's him. It's really him. It's the one, that boy I've been gabbing on about all this time, with the dark, confident eyes flecked with gold specks, a strand of chestnut brown hair curling over his forehead, his mouth quirking up one corner as he smirked at the camera. He feels so familiar, feels so much like at home, and I just stare at his picture, losing myself in his eyes even as the announcer says something about "Stark Industries," "recently found in the Middle east," "billionaire," "critical condition." 

"The reason I bring this up," Natasha says, voice drowning out the announcer's and interrupting my reverie, "is that we'll probably be meeting him sometime soon. He's round at Nick's, or something. Or holed up in that penthouse apartment of his or wherever he lives, wouldn't surprise me if he had the Empire State Building as his personal residence, he's worth something like $200 billion or something obscene like that -"

I tune out Natasha and turn back to the screen, where he's still smiling at me, his gaze cool and confident, and for the first time in almost a year, I find myself thrown completely off schedule. 


	2. Name

A few weeks later, he comes in, looking nothing at all like the cool, confident, absolutely collected young man I'd seen in the photographs on the television and the newspaper articles that Natasha had given him to read over. No. In fact, Tony comes to me in pieces, literal pieces, sitting down heavily at the glass-topped dining table and keeping a hand placed protectively over his chest. In the gaps between his fingers, a soft blue light is pulsing in irregular increments, and even as I watch, he grimaces a little bit, his eyes closing and his brows furrowing as though he's in intense pain, curling and hunching his shoulders over his chest, taking in a deep hissing breath that whistles through the clutch of his teeth. Nick bangs his hands down on the table, and Tony jumps in surprise, biting down on his lip and closing his eyes as an honest-to-God cog pops out from between his fingers and clatters onto the table with a little series of clinks. He's clammy and pale, and I've got a really hard time equating the young man in the pictures with the one in front of me. He looks like he's aged about twenty years. 

"This is Anthony Stark," Nick says, either ignoring or not caring about Tony's apparent discomfort. "I expect the two of you to try and get along." Before I can ask for the reasoning behind this strange request, Nick just straightens up, slaps his hands together for a bit as though dusting himself of us, and just tells us that he has a few plans for a few things. No other explanation before he just gets up and leaves. 

I bite at my lip, twiddle my thumbs under the table, take a covert peek at Tony from under my lashes when I think he isn't looking. He is, his dark gaze - and oh, his eyes are just like I imagined, chocolate brown with flecks of green and gold - piercing through me, staring at me like he can't believe I'm sitting in front of him. I suppose it's not every day young multibillionaires with interesting physical oddities meet Captain America, I guess, but his eyes are tracing the contours of my face, a bit like what I do for my art classes, as though he's taking in every line and every plane. I've never felt quite so self-conscious. 

"So...would you like a drink?" I ask him, this man with the unnerving stare, this man who has not yet said a word. I'm already out of my seat and standing at the fridge before he finally speaks. 

"Steve." 

I'm not sure what I was expecting. It  _is_ my name after all, but the way he says it is so familiar that I can't help but turn to him. I'm surprised to find him smiling a bit, the right corner of his mouth quirking up just like I expected, the little dimple in his cheek, just like I knew would be there. Natasha's told me a bit about deja vu, and though I'm not normally one to believe in coincidence and that sort of stuff, I can't help but feel that this has definitely, definitely happened before. It's startling and shocking, and I drop my eyes to the cool, unassuming cans of sparkling fruit juice that stand in neat rows on the shelves. When I look back up, he's looking away, drumming his fingers on the table, and I begin to wonder if I've imagined the whole thing. 

The cans of fizzy orange juice are icy in my hands, and I set one down in front of him with a solid thunk. He looks up, looks down at the can of juice, back up at me. 

"How are you liking my time?" he asks. 

I've no idea how much/what he knows about me, wonder if Nick or Natasha's been giving him Captain America paraphernalia to read just like they gave me the link to his Wikipedia article and the history of Stark Industries in a nutshell. For the latter, I just skipped ahead to the part in the 1960s. 

"It's...quite convenient," I answer carefully. It's a safe answer, a solid one that's unassuming and unoffending to all parties involved, though it isn't quite the truth. 

He smiles at me. "You mean it's complicated. It's fast, it's noisy, and we don't have flying cars yet, like my father thought we might have." 

I have to stop myself from unconsciously gaping at him. Granted, I hadn't been going to say any of that, certainly not to the multibillionaire owner of a technology mega-corporation, but he reads me so concisely and accurately that I begin to wonder if there's been mind-reading technology invented yet. 

I clear my throat, stalling for time to come up with something else to say. "That's...er...quite an interesting contraption you've got there," I tell him, nodding in the direction of his chest, which is glowing blue circles through his dress shirt. "I mean, if it's okay to talk about it, I get it if it's something sensitive you don't want to mention or anything." 

He arches an eyebrow at me, apparently not shocked or disturbed or even particularly surprised at this very direct remark. "Do you want to see it?" he asks, and before I can protest or say anything to dissuade him, he's slipping buttons through buttonholes and peeling away the fabric. His skin carries a slight tan, and pulsing waves of soft blue light ripple over the flesh. There are pieces of metal embedded directly in his skin, making a soft whirring as a fan spins somewhere inside it, and for a moment I think of science fiction movies, of monsters with artificial hearts, but then a little bead of blood trickles down his sternum with a particularly ominous sounding clunk from the circle, and he mutters a curse and presses a hand against it, drawing back rust-stained fingertips. 

"Let me get you a cloth or something," I say, jumping up, but he just holds up a hand, tells me that water might damage the mechanism, and I slowly sit back down, trying to get up the nerve to ask him why. 

"It's to keep me alive," he says simply, as though he's answered the question hundreds of times before. "There's metal near my heart and this reactor helps keep it from actually reaching it." 

"Right," I say, nodding as if this all makes sense when in reality I'm horrendously technologically challenged and still have trouble trying to work the DVD player. 

"I was thinking about you overseas," he says. "I've missed talking to you a lot, Steve." 

This time, I really do gape at him. I've never talked to this boy in my life.  _Boy?_ I think to myself.  _Surely that's not right. He's already a young man, probably around the age I was when I had the serum injections, I've no right to be calling him "boy."  
_

He looks up at me when I don't say anything, frowns at me. 

"It's alright if you didn't miss me," he says, smiling and trying to shrug it off, but there's a hint of despair in the depths of those brown green gold eyes and I want to reach out and tell him that I don't mean it that I really do remember him, but that would make me a liar, and I'm not good enough at keeping track of mistruths in my head long enough for them to actually become full-fledged facts. "I'm sure you were probably busy reading or something. You had decades of historical events to catch up on." 

Now I'm convinced he must be thinking of a different person. Perhaps the accident he was in that led to that mechanical reactor in his chest also gave him a concussion, or severe amnesia, or something. Because if you asked me to tell you what happened in 1970, I wouldn't be able to tell you. Because I don't know anything about what happened in 1970. 

"Are you sure you've got the right person?" I ask him cautiously, because his face has gone pale again and he's rubbing at his chest with a grimace. "I'm not yet up to date with US history. Lately I've been reading accounts of the war, I mean, the one I was supposed to be in before the Tesseract and the Arctic crash and everything...." 

He stares up at me blankly. "No," he says after a moment. "That's not right, that can't be right." 

We stare at each other for so long that we both jump when someone bangs on the door. I hasten to open it, quickly step aside as a petite blonde woman in a pinstriped jacket and matching skirt marches in, her heels click clacking purposefully on the floor. She makes a beeline for Anthony, crossing her arms in front of her, and telling him quite sternly that he oughtn't to exert himself in this fashion, and that she'd just finished double and triple checking his personal accounts balances, and now it was time to be getting home, Jarvis was getting worried - 

She buttons up his shirt with efficiency, each button sliding neatly and effortlessly into place, and drags him upright before clicking away out the door again. He sighs, running a hand through his hair and ruffling it up, before following her, and as I turn to watch his receding back, I wonder about the reason behind the squeezing in my chest, the feeling of abject desperation and acceptance that comes with being left behind not just once but again - 

"I guess I'll be seeing you, Steve," he says, turning just a bit to face me before he disappears around the corner. 

"I guess you will, Tony," I reply, and his eyes widen just a fraction before he smiles, the first genuine smile of the encounter, and opens his mouth to say something else, but a slender manicured hand whips out from the corner and grasps his sleeve to drag him away. 


	3. Mischief

Nick tells me that he's planning to start something that he lovingly calls the Avengers Initiative. One might think it's an odd adjective to use to describe anything that he does, but he got a bit of that religious fervour in his eye that Bucky used to get whenever he got excited, talking about the war in his military uniform and bouncing up and down in his bed when he was supposed to be sleeping because he just couldn't keep still. It was a bit like that, just slightly more terrifying. In this case, slightly means "a lot." 

He tells me that this Avengers Initiative is going to be a group of superheroes, of people like me and Tony and Natasha, dedicated to saving the world and keeping its people safe. I guess it's something I can support, that I can really see myself being a part of, which is something I haven't been able to say for a long time about anything, really. Obviously, it's still a bit odd thinking of myself as a superhero, as Captain America, but that would be the case with anyone, I'm sure. 

It's a bit scary, actually, knowing that people look up to me like that, seeing my face in the newspaper almost on the daily: "Captain America returns!", "Captain America awake once again!", headlines like that, as if they knew all along that I would be coming back and they just had to bide their time and be patient. When I look in the mirror, I just see myself. 

* * *

I've been thinking about Tony some lately. He's been doing better, or so Natasha tells me, zipping from my flat to his place and back; he's still looking a bit pale and pinched, but obviously that's only on account of his recent activities. She tells me that his secretary, Pepper, or whatever she is to him, guards him like a dog, lashing out and snapping, keeping a close watch on his vitals and making him lie down if his heart so much as skips a beat. She's shooed Natasha out of his place more than a few times, but she always manages to find a way back in, insistent. I suppose that's part of why Nick wants her for this Avengers Initiative thing. Natasha could worm more information out of a brick than most people could, even if equipped with truth serum and lie detectors and the world's most knowledgeable person at their disposal. 

I wonder if Pepper loves him. It's a bit of a well known fact that young people in proximity are often drawn together, orbiting each other's moods like planets and suns, tangling each other into webs of affection like spiders, drawn with threads so fine that you can't see them until you're well and truly stuck and you're forced to tear yourself free, leaving bits of yourself behind, if you want to leave. She probably loves him. 

I'm supposed to be happy for him. The boy deserves a bit of happiness in his life, if what I've read up about him in recent news and on the Internet has even a grain of truth. 

I'm supposed to be happy. I'm awake, I'm alive, I'm healthy. 

But it feels like something is missing, something I can taste just at the edge of sleep, in that moment when you're still sort of waking up but everything is still foggy and still trying to hold on to the best dream you've ever had. 

You, and I, fail every time. 

* * *

I told Natasha about this the other day, and she rolled those mascara-lined eyes at me and told me that I was probably just lonely, and wanting for some "female company." I arched an eyebrow at her, unsure if this was innuendo or not; knowing Natasha, it more likely than not was.

"Okay, Mr. Super Soldier," she muttered, heading for my kitchen window and making to jump out. "Don't see Peggy, even after I went through all that trouble to track her down for you."

She has a leg completely out of the window before I can finally react past my shock -  _She's still alive? After all this time? -_ and run over to grab her wrist, pulling her back through the window. Her black leather boots make two satisfyingly solid clicks on the tile floor. 

"You...found Peggy?" I ask, disbelieving. There's no way it's the same Peggy. Peggy has to be a common name, and so many records were lost regarding people in the war, and by this time she'd be...she'd be ancient, looking the way I should be, wrinkles and milky eyes that have started to lose their colour, and blue veins tracing rivers through translucent skin. "Peggy Carter? My Peggy Carter?"

"Of course, your Peggy Carter," Natasha says, examining her perfectly manicured nails. She's put on some sort of perfume today that reminds me of summertime and warmth and apple pie, and the impatience in her tone makes me feel like I'm keeping her from something, or someone, important. "Are you going to come along or not?" she asks, tapping the toe of her boot against the tiles quickly, a staccato beat mirroring the insistent tattoo of my heart. 

"Right," I say, swallowing roughly and trying to ignore the sudden dryness in my mouth. The keys to my motorcycle are heavy and cold in my hand as I scoop them off the kitchen counter and march mechanically out the door. 

* * *

She looks almost exactly like I imagined, the girl who opens the door of the brownstone townhouse in the lower Manhattan Area. The same curly chocolate hair, the same perky Cupid's bow mouth, the same rounded eyes with a mischievous twinkle in the corners. Her mouth drops open and she gapes up at me, her hand clutched loosely around the doorknob, and I'm speechless for a few moments, picturing her in beige uniform nipped in at the waist, a tight cap wound around her brown curls, scarlet lipstick tracing the curves of her mouth as the smell of gunpowder and rust fills my mind - 

"You must be here to see Grandma," she says, after a long moment, and I shake myself out of my memories. 

"Right you are," Natasha says from behind me, smiling cheerfully at the girl and prodding me rather hard in the back to get me to step over the threshold. "You've got to remember," she says in an aside to the girl, "this guy here," - she pinches me in the arm - "is just a fuddy duddy old man with memories from way back in the day, you've got to cut him some slack, he thinks World War II is still going on." 

I can still hear the girl's laughter as Natasha marches me up the stairs. 

* * *

Peggy's room smells like camphor, mothballs, age, and it takes me a few moments to realise that the woman sitting by the window, her back hunched, her hair a wispy white, shares a slight trace of the features of the girl downstairs, just saggy and faded and creased around the corners. Her mouth twitches up at the corners, skin bunched and bagged around her throat as she holds out a thin, wrinkled hand to me. 

"Steve," she murmurs, her voice quiet and tired. "You never did take me dancing on that Saturday." 

I sit down beside her, her hand held comfortably within my own. We're technically roughly the same age, but time has frozen me in a healthy, hale, twenty-year-old body, and stripped her of her youthfulness to give it to the girl downstairs. I wonder if I will ever get old enough to grow wrinkled and wise, or if the serum will eventually just stop working and I'll decay to nothing in a matter of moments. I wonder which I would prefer.

"Yeah," I say, my thumb quietly stroking over the liver-spotted back of her hand. "Sorry about that." 

We sit in silence for a few moments, watching the cars stream by outside, the sound of traffic muted by the thick glass window. 

"I've had a good life," she says after a while. "I had a few loves, a husband, a few children, a few pets here and there, grandchildren." It isn't mocking, it isn't condescending, just facts, someone telling a history of her story in a highly condensed manner. "But I never forgot you."

"Maybe now that I'm back," I murmur, "we can go dancing. That's still something people do for fun, or so Natasha tells me."

She smiles. "These pins don't work quite so well anymore," she says, gesturing down at her legs, wrapped up in a blanket, with her free hand. "But perhaps you can convince me to do a waltz with you when you get married."

"I don't think that will be happening any time soon," I say, smiling.

She looks at me, a sly smirk on her face, and in that instant she looks exactly like her granddaughter, mischievous and playful. 

"No?" she asks, but even I can tell it's a rhetorical question. "You know, being gay isn't a big deal anymore. In fact, it's fairly normal. Oh, don't look at me like that," she says, slapping me playfully on the shoulder. "Anyone with half a brain could see you were totally into that Bucky character. Did you know there's even websites now where people can write stories featuring the two of you together? Some of them aren't half bad."

* * *

Natasha has to drive the motorcycle home (despite the fact that she doesn't have a licence), because I spend the entire ride home trying to wrap my mind around everything. 

 

 

 


	4. Patches

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorry I've been gone for so long. I will try to update more frequently, I promise.

I've been having these dreams lately. I know it sounds stupid, pedestrian, everybody has dreams, but I think I can safely promise you that the vast majority of people don't have the same set of dreams over and over again. I've read in an article somewhere that your average dream lasts around 5 to 20 minutes, but I feel like this is an estimate that is grossly off-point. 

I feel like my dreams last a lifetime. Maybe they do. As Natasha is so fond of pointing out, I  _have_ been asleep for the past half-century or so, and then some. That's at least one lifetime. Maybe more, if they're tragically cut short through some mistake of their own, or some unforeseeable accident that doesn't have a method of prevention. 

Enough rambling. You'll have to forgive me for it, I tend to forget ("in my advanced age," as Natasha likes to say, with an elbow to my ribs) that the world is faster now and thoughts and words and actions fly across the skyline as quick as birds, and this leads to impatience and irritation when people don't get to the point as quickly as one would like. 

My first few steps into this century honestly nearly knocked me out. Running outside with nothing but the clothes on your back and staring around you and realising just how many colours and noises and flashes there are, it's enough to make a man sick to his stomach if he's not used to it. The electronic billboards advertising classic Coke (at least that hadn't changed) seemed to be in a constant war with the ones just across the street advertising Pepsi, pixels of neon light flaring across my pupils and making my head hurt. If it hadn't been for some quick SHIELD intervention (or so the story goes), I probably would have passed out right in the middle of the First and Broadway, or whatever intersection it had been. In all honesty, it's so hard to read the sign names these days, what with all the lights spinning around you, you know? 

And can we just take a moment to talk about the parking signs? No parking every day except Tuesdays from 8-3? And then literally maybe a block away, "No parking on Tuesdays." And the Gods of Parking, or whoever checks to make sure you're parked correctly and not overextending your allotted time, are extremely strict about their jobs. I see women juggling babies and their cell phones (impossibly small, by the way, just like Howard Stark told me they would be one day, a tiny little brick with the voices and numbers all inside and easy just at the push of a button away, talking to anybody, anywhere in the world, any time) and their vanilla soy lattes, the whole while slotting quarters into the meters and checking their watches to make sure they've paid for enough time in increments of 15 minutes or what have you. And Heaven forbid you over extend your time, or those "Meter Maids," as they're called, come and mark your tire with a little bit of chalk, frowning and tapping out tickets on their clipboards if you've done something wrong. 

I'm a bit ashamed to say that I've gotten at least four parking tickets in the past month or so. Natasha never fails to start laughing at me every time she comes over and sees the tickets fanned out across my dining table in some mimicry of a brochure. 

Anyway. Back to the dreams, like I've been meaning to say for the past few minutes or so. I told you I rambled.

I remember things in bits and pieces, more and more as time since my awakening goes on. My memories (dreams?) are still incredibly patchy, sometimes just fragments of voices that I hear when I'm lying in bed and staring at the stucco popcorn ceiling and wondering why my vision isn't filled with deep blue and the faint mist of my own breath fogging up in front of me. 

Sometimes I hear a baby crying when my eyes are still gummy with sleep and I haven't fully come to my senses. This confuses me more than worries me (though, with all the horror series and stuff going around, Natasha says I should be downright terrified, should be calling an exorcist from the local parish to come and check out my flat RIGHT AWAY), but I've got this nagging feeling in the back of my mind, tugging at my eyeballs, that I should probably be trying to help this baby, that it needs to be shushed and snuggled and calmed with a nice warm bottle and a bedtime story or three, and I can personally tell you that I've never been too much of a kid person, despite what all the news reports and things might say. 

Sometimes I see flashes of Bucky's face, smiling back over his shoulder at me at the World Expo, the lights from Howard Stark's "flying automobile" bouncing off the planes of his cheekbones, a girl hanging off each of his arms and smiling adoringly up at him. And I remember feeling all fuzzy inside, knowing that he had turned to look especially at me, a tiny smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye like he had something he wanted to tell me after the show. That was when I knew, I think. That I was gay. 

Even now, it's odd saying it out loud. The word feels all wrong in my mouth, a secret that I don't want to have on my tongue, and though Natasha's assured me time and time again that it's the 21st century, there's absolutely nothing wrong with it, in fact there's even things like pride parades where people celebrate this sort of thing. It's very festive, she assured me, and there was absolutely no shame in it. I think I just haven't gotten used to the mindset of this century, yet. 

Just the other day I burnt myself on the toaster. Apparently the number on the toaster face is not actually how toasty said toast will be. It's instead a measure of time (and, hence, the longer it runs, the more likely it is to be hot. The more you know, I guess.) 

Back to the memories. Dreams. Whatever they are. It's all blurring together in my mind now.

I read somewhere that you never dream up new faces. All of the people in your dreams, even if you think you don't know them, are actually faces you've seen before. Your brain isn't capable of making up new ones, or something to that extent, though I'm personally subscribed to the belief that our brains know a lot more than they're letting on, and they're just refusing to share that information with us. That can be pretty dangerous, withholding information. It gets young boys killed in wars (and yes, if you're wondering, this is about Bucky, hasn't it always been about Bucky?)

I want to believe he's not dead. I want to I want to I want to.

If I close my eyes and lie very still and silent, listening to the city breathing outside with its honks and lazy engine purrs, I can almost picture him, like he was back then. 

The planes of his cheeks, perfect and sculpted (and, obviously, you always put your first love, second, third, hell, maybe even your last, love up on a pedestal, so this is most likely exaggeration. I prefer to think it's not). His mouth, quirked up at the corners, dragging a dimple into view at the last second as his eyes crinkled while he laughed, deep and rolling from his chest. His nose, crooked ever so slightly at the bridge where it had been broken doing god know's what. His eyes, lashes thick at the edges, chocolate brown with flecks of green and gold - 

And then I sit up, my heart palpitating roughly in my chest. 

The baby is crying again, somewhere beyond the noise of the city, and I have to take a few deep breaths, smog and copper and cotton, before I can accept the fact that I've just been picturing Tony. 


	5. Hazy Fog

I went to bed the night before Christmas to a snowstorm blowing violently outside my bedroom window. I was much too old to believe in Santa Claus, but there was still something magical in having a white Christmas, where you walked outside in the morning to maybe get your paper or the bottles of milk on your front stoop that had already developed a crust of white frost (did people still get milk delivered? I wondered. I certainly hadn't had any milk delivered while I had been alive in this century), and you shivered in your old terrycloth bathrobe, your breath trailing puffs of white into the air. You'd pick up your paper, or your milk, and you'd hurry back inside, diving underneath flannel sheets and warming your chilled feet, hopefully against a somewhat-disgruntled love's back.

Bucky used to like to do that. He'd wake me up with icy soles planted firmly in the small of my back, back when it was still a secret, back when I thought nobody knew about us. I guess I was wrong about that. Back in the day, I used to hate it. But I think now, I'd give anything to have it back.

Yet.

What I once felt for Bucky is a bit like a matchstick that's just freshly burnt out. Distance makes the heart grow fonder, or so the saying goes, but unfortunately, it's perhaps only relevant to physical distance and not temporal, or both at the same time. I can still feel the softly smoldering embers of my love for him, waiting to be blown into life again, but hiding themselves under a soft cover of black ash, waiting. Watching. Still tracking every tall, slender man with dark curls I see in the crowd, hoping somewhere deep in the corners of my mind that when he turns around it will be him, even though this doesn't make sense, even though Bucky is probably long gone, or a part of someone else's life now.

And when those men, tall, slender, dark waves in their hair, do turn around, I find their features blurring, hazy, until every dark-haired, tall, slender man turns around to be Tony. I can't explain it at all. I've only met the boy - no, the man - a few times, and yet I can't get him out of my mind.

Natasha suggested I should go and see him. Maybe there's a reason for it.

"Or," she told me, digging a sharp elbow into my ribs, "maybe it's love at first sight, like the fairy tales. I'll let him know you want to see him."

I'm a tad too old for fairy tales, but I suppose there can't be too much harm in trying to believe that the reasons behind the universe being the way it is are divined through magic and a dash of pixie dust.

* * *

 

I didn't know the proper gift to get for Tony. What exactly, I rationalise to myself as I ride up the lift, empty-handed, to the penthouse of the tower emblazoned with his name, could a billionaire, trillionaire, whatever obscene amount-naire he was, possibly want or need? I'd contemplated picking up a nice bottle of whiskey or other such alcohol, but somehow, this didn't seem like such a good idea. I can't exactly explain why, but it just didn't feel right, giving a bottle of liquor to this young man with the intense gaze and metal scattered throughout his chest.

The lift opens into his penthouse, and I step out into what seems like Heaven. It's decorated rather tastefully, the walls white, the carpets and furniture in varying shades of cream, a large, wide-open space where a person could laze about all day and lose themselves in the low-hanging clouds that skidded by the floor-to-ceiling windows.

He comes out of an adjoining room, his bare feet padding gently across the floor, his hair wet and curling across his forehead. He's wearing a cable-knit sweater that's just a bit too big for him, and if it hadn't been for his height and the soft little patches of facial hair that were just a mere whisper on his cheeks and jaw, I could swear by it that he was a child.

Pepper is nowhere to be seen, and I was unduly glad for this. After our rocky introduction (if it could be called that), I didn't think it would be a particularly informational visit if she was there, sitting next to him on the sofa and looking all protective and glaring at me out of the corner of her eye if she thought I was causing him unwarranted distress. I was here for a reason, after all.

When he sees me looking around, a whisper of a smile creeps up around the corners of his mouth.

"She's visiting family," he explains, though I hadn't asked. "And even then she's only over in Queens. I sometimes feel like I'm on LifeAlert or something."

I quirk an eyebrow at him. I am not familiar with that reference.

"Fancy a drink?" he asks, his back already to me as he walks through the white room; with the clouds outside, pressing up against the glass, it has a very asylum-like feel, the only colour coming from his dark hair and the shell pink of the backs of his bare heels as he walks away from me, his feet leaving long, sloping indents in the carpet that fades away as quickly as they're placed. "Nothing stronger than ginger ale, I'm afraid," he calls from the other room. "I'm trying not to repeat history, or as best I can, anyway. The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry, or something like that."

Right! I think to myself, that was why you didn't buy him a bottle of alcohol. He doesn't drink it anyway. The part about history, I suppose that's as sage advice as any, if the military history of the United States is anything to go by.

"Just water is fine," I tell him, and a few moments later he pads back out, holding out a crystal-cut, heavy water glass to me, a few ice cubes and a slice of lemon floating in the water.

"So, merry Christmas," he says, sitting down next to me me on the cream sofa, and I can't help but notice how he looks almost washed-out, tired, fatigued. "I'm not exactly a festive person," he adds, almost in apology, gesturing around at the obvious lack of Christmas decoration.

"Merry Christmas," I reply. A short silence falls, and I fiddle with the heavy water glass in my hand, wondering what the appropriate words to say are. 'Hey, I keep seeing you everywhere, do you know why that is?' That seemed downright stalker-ish.

In the end, he is the one to break the silence. "Do you want to watch the Disney Christmas Parade?" he asks, but before I can agree or not, he is already pressing the pad of his index finger against the glass top of his coffee table, and I can only watch, open-mouthed in shock and amazement, as a series of blue holographs spills across the clear surface and he taps on them and they respond in little whirls of numbers and images.

He catches me looking, smiles in my direction. "It's artificial intelligence," he says, and just like that, I can see his father rooted deep somewhere behind his eyes, layered over with boyhood and kindness and confusion. "Just a prototype. I'm hoping to refine it a bit more. Things have changed in the past few decades," he teases, and I have no choice but to agree.

A soft whirring, and I look up to see the largest television I've ever seen emerge from a hidden panel in the wall, already tuned to channel 57, where the sun is shining warmly down and princesses wave from their perches on their floats. I've never been to Disneyland, but with the way the people on the screen are carrying on, it seems like a fantastic place to be.

Tony grins at me, the corner of his mouth crooking up, just like I'd known it would. He's got more than a bit of his father in him, and whether that's a good or bad thing is something I guess will be left to be determined. "It's the happiest place on earth, supposedly," he says, matter-of-factly, as the snow falls outside. "Though they've got one in Florida, too, and others internationally. I guess every hemisphere deserves a chance to be the happiest place on earth."

"Right," I tell him, and I turn back to the screen and the question of how to bring up his persistent presence in the forefront of my mind. The characters and their floats pass in front of my eyes without me really seeing them, and, suddenly, just as Donald Duck and Daisy are doing a waltz in front of a pearlescent pink castle, a soft, solid weight comes to rest in my lap. I look down, and his feet are resting there as he stretches out in sleep.

His head is resting, nestled in the crook of his arm against the cream arm of the sofa. His eyes are closed, long lashes brushing against the tops of his cheeks, and his mouth has gone lax, soft and pouty. And yes, he may be pale and washed-out, yes, there may be a bright neon blue circle pulsing gently through the minuscule holes in his cable knit sweater, and yes, I never did quite get around to asking the question, but this.

This feels right, like I'm supposed to be here, and I haven't been able to say that about many things since I got here.

This is okay.


End file.
